


La Dolce Vita

by Ramenmustachio



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Anal Sex, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Trauma, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Murder Husbands, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Short Chapters, Thomas Harris References
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-05-25 09:35:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6189340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ramenmustachio/pseuds/Ramenmustachio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”<br/>― Søren Kierkegaard</p><p>Hannibal wakes alone on the beach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue I- Boston, 1976

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.  
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.  
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day  
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,  
your hands the color of a savage harvest,  
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,  
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,  
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,  
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,  
hunting for you, for your hot heart,  
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.”  
― Pablo Neruda

 

        When Doctor Walker stepped into the room for Elizabeth Graham’s psych eval, it only took one glance at her colt-like eyes to decide that she would fail. Her newborn was cradled in his father’s arms, across the room from her in a chair. The dryness of mid-Winter in Boston pervaded the warmth within the room, rendering the air pleasant but stale.  
        “Good morning Elizabeth, my name is Doctor Walker.” His words split the tension in the room with the alacrity of a gunshot.  
“Mornin,” mumbled Mr. Graham.  
    “How are you feeling?” Doctor Walker asked, his attention quickly returning to the empty woman sweating on the sheets. Although she glanced up at him, it took her an extensive amount of time to process his question. The awkward minute before her reply was spent by listening to the steady pulse of the Maternity Ward. When her eyes finally rolled back up to Doctor Walker’s jowls, he saw the desperation in her face.  
        “Mr. Graham, would you leave us for a moment? Some of the things your wife and I will need to discuss are private.”  
Ezra did not look pleased to hear that he was not needed, but he muttered a “sure thing” before handing the baby to his mother and slinking out of the room.  
The moment Ezra’s back disappeared, she put the child down. “Now, Mrs. Graham,” Doctor Walker’s introduction was interrupted by a curt  
    “Call me Beth.”  
“Okay then, Beth. My doctorate is in psychology; can you guess why I’m here?”  
Her face betrayed nothing, no hint of surprise or confusion as to why a psychologist might be visiting her.  
     “You probably think I’m crazy.”  
“Now, that’s not a term we use in the medical field. One of the nurses reported that you seem to be having a rough time with your son, is that right?”  
She nodded.  
      “Okay, so we just need to make sure that you’re doing alright before we release you. Can you answer some questions for me?”  
Beth could feel his lack of enthusiasm for his job, not really in his tone or anything, but in the vortex of his eyes. When she looked at him, actually looked, it felt like she fell into his skin and couldn’t crawl out of it. That’s why the only person she ever looks at is Ezra. And William. It’s safe to look at him because he’s so blank- he doesn’t feel anything; he isn’t hiding anything. He’s just empty. Like her.  
     “Beth?”  
She jolts upright, startling the babe, which begins to bawl. Walker watches her immediately identify why her son is crying, and she nonchalantly bares a heavy breast and raises his head to it.  
    “Yes, I’ll answer your questions.”  
“Great. Here is a piece of paper- there are sixty questions on there. Just go through and answer by filling in the circles next to these statements; you see?"  
     “Mmm.”  
“If you have any questions, I will be sitting right here in this chair.”  
       The absent scratching of her pencil was lost to the overwhelming sounds of the hospital, the gentle suckling of her babe and the forceful whirring of the fans jammed between the window panes and their ledges. The baby nodded off after he had finished his meal, and she did not seem to notice that he was asleep, nor that her full breast was exposed. Walker noted it.  
      While taking the test, the tension drained from her body. Watching her face, the doctor felt like he might be seeing what she looked like before giving birth. She was incredibly thin for a woman who had carried a child to full term- she had a square jaw and impressive collarbones that jutted from the base of her throat like they were leaping from her skin. Her wrists were slender and feminine, and her hands were as tiny as a child’s. He could tell that her breasts, when not swollen with milk, were as small and firm as lemons, and that she lacked what would be deemed a “feminine” figure. All in all, she should have been hideous, unhealthy and fragile.  
And yet, Doctor Walker was sure that if he were twenty years younger, he would yearn for her. She was strikingly beautiful in a very broken way. A man who preferred the rounder types- the Marilyns and the Sophia Lorens of the world- could see this coltish woman and yearn to see the details of her spine, the gaps in her ribs and the bones in her feet.  
       Instead of jotting all this down, he simply wrote _anorexia nervosa? Generalized anxiety disorder? Insomnia?_  
After she finished, he asked her the general questions- “Are you excited to have a baby?” “What were your parents like?” “Do you want to go home?” “Is your marriage a happy one?” “Do you feel like you have the necessary resources to provide for William?” and received normal rational responses. She passed her evaluation with flying colors, and although he felt like there was something sinister within her, he could find no good reason to restrain Beth.  
Besides, he reasoned, Ezra seemed like a good husband. He would watch out for her and the baby. What’s the use of crowding the psychiatric floor with one more misdiagnosed woman?

* * *

 

      “I want to go down South.”  
“Why darlin’? That’s where I came from, and I sure as hell don’t wanna go back. Besides, do you really want Willy to be raised like I was?”  
     “I thought you said you loved Louisiana?”  
“Naw, I said I loved the food,” Ezra chuckled.  
     “I’m sick of this place. I hate how grey the sky gets in the cold months. It makes me feel so drained. I want Willy to be in the sunshine,” Beth’s soft voice filled the cab of Ezra’s pickup with an air of finality.  
    “Well, it ain’t so easy to move. Why don’t we wait a little while? Willy’s only four months old, it’ll be awfully hard to take care of him and put all our shit-“  
“Don’t cuss.”  
Ezra raised a brow, confused as to why his wife, the woman whose first words after their first kiss were “Goddamn that was good,” would ridicule him for saying an itty bitty word like shit.  
   “… all our stuff into a house. Where do you even wanna live? The swamp? The city? What’s going on with you, darlin’? You ain’t seemed quite right since we brought him home.”  
“I’m fine,” she said, and Ezra watched her lips flatten into a straight line.  
   He pulled into an empty parking lot next to the Stop and Shop and switched off the engine.  
“Why did you stop?”  
   “You ain’t fine.”  
“I told you, it’s nothing. I’ll get over it.”  
“   Don’t bullshit me.”  
“Stop swearing! We have a child now, you can’t just say things like that around him.”  
  “He ain’t even here. Stop tryin’ to distract me and give me a goddamn answer.”  
She regarded him with empty eyes, her hollow cheeks and rigid nose making her look like a skeleton.  
 “Or what?”  
“Or, I take you back to the hospital and tell them about how you passed that test they gave you.”  
 “Ezra?” She gasped, horrified that he would reveal her secret. He had promised her on the night of their engagement that he would never tell a living soul.  
“I know I promised that I wouldn’t, but you aren’t well. You hardly hold Willy, you can’t look anybody in the eyes anymore, your hands shake in the morning and I hear you cry in the shower every mornin’.”  
    “I’ll get better, it’s just the hormones,” she pleaded.  
“How do I explain to our son that you can’t love him? How do I wait this one out? You need help. This empathy thing you got goin’ on is fucking you up, it’s twisting your brain around and makin’ you hate life. Some gumbo and sunshine ain’t gonna fix that.”  
She heaved a sigh and rested her head on the cool glass of the window. Her silvery blue eyes picked up the greyness of the sky and the azure of the fading paint on the exterior of the truck. Another marital spat ended with silence, another empty car ride home.


	2. Prologue II- Lithuania, 1976

       The barn was too cold. Hannibal knew that he needed to sneak back into the cabin when they weren’t looking. But they were always looking. His stomach growled underneath his many sweaters. It had been four days without anything more than some bones from a dormouse that had skittered across his body in the night. The mouse was too lean to eat meat, so he had tucked its bones into his cheeks and sucked the marrow out of them. Like a dog, he’d chewed incessantly for two days.  
He decided that he would return to the cabin in the morning when the coals from breakfast would still be hot. If there was any breakfast. No matter, as long as there were hot coals, then he could do what his mother did for Mischa and heat some water and a cloth with them. Then he would place his sister’s head above the bowl but under the cloth and help to loosen some of her congestion.  
      He felt too weak to make the jump from the hayloft to the floor so he made his way down the rotten ladder and hoped it wouldn’t snap. His light feet bore a silent path through the frozen hay and  out into the brightness of dawn in the winter. The cabin had lost the warmth he’d always associated with it- the windows were grey and lifeless, the smoke coming from the chimney curled a frail and transparent curlicue about the house that barely touched the tops of the trees.  
He slid a small hand into his pocket and curled it around his father’s knife. He would not allow the others to do to him what the bearded man did. They knew to leave him be. The door was unlocked, and it took almost all of his measly strength to open it. Once he crossed the threshold, the smell hit him. It was warm and vaguely fragrant and seemed to hang over the house like a curtain. It reminded him of Mama’s stew.  
      On the small woodstove, a large soup pot steamed. With hopes carefully guarded, Hannibal crept past his captors and their empty bowls where they slept at the table. He gently peered over the lip of the pot and found a dark red stew, full of chunks of meat and what appeared to be a thick broth. They must have downed an elk, he reasoned, sticking a finger into the taste. He would get a bowl of this for Mischa first, then he’d come back for more.  
Carefully ladling her share, he made his way to the closet that had become her nursery. When he opened the door, he found her blankets were soaked with urine and phlegm and that the room stank of fear. It was small and dark, almost like a womb. The wetness of her bodily fluids slid over his skin with the slickness of oil and he needed to put her bowl down.  
      The knowledge that would break his delicate mind loomed above his head like Damocles’ sword. At the unsophisticated age of ten, he could sense the tide of his own ruin. He knew it would strike him swiftly, that this night in the cabin would end with him in a pot or alone. Instead of facing what he knew, at his heart of hearts, to be true, he curled himself up in her blankets and shut the door. Hannibal was far too large for such a space.  
Hannibal knew there was something wrong with him when he did not cry. He wanted to, his eyeballs itched as if they sensed his predicaments. Instead, he nestled around in the darkness and slurped the soup. It surprised him that the taste was not repulsive- it certainly didn’t taste of elk, and it was bloodier than he would have liked, but there was an earthiness to it that warmed him. His stomach moaned with the sudden influx of rich food, and he rested a gentle hand on his abdomen to quiet it.  
      One bowl would not be enough. Soon, he’d need to open the door and face the men. He knew they wouldn’t let him have a second bowl- he knew he’d be next once the pot was empty. Hannibal’s lips quirked upwards for the first time in weeks when he thought of the knife he’d hidden in his pocket.  
Once the last drops of soup had been licked from his lips and the bowl was grasped firmly in his left hand, he left the velvety womb of his sister’s closet. The rest of the cabin had fallen as cold as the ground it was built upon; Hannibal guessed that he may have lost consciousness for a while because the sun was more than halfway across the sky. The men were awake but still seated in the kitchen. He could hear the scrape of uncut fingernails against the wooden bowls his mother preferred. They were gorging themselves on his sister’s remains.  
On socked feet, he slid into the kitchen, grabbed the knife and was reborn.


	3. Texas, 1977

     Her headlights bobbed like the lures of angler fish against the horizon. She’d been driving for what felt like years but could have been moments. She stopped when the car ran out of gas. She slept when her brain made her. She didn’t eat. She didn’t feed the baby- it had gone silent some time ago. Her eyes ached, and she refused to look at herself in the rearview mirror. She knew that the woman she would see was not her- it was the woman who had grabbed the child she didn’t want and hopped in her husband’s truck. It was the woman who left. She had a feeling she was somewhere in Texas- it had been longer than she thought.

         She turned, looked at her beautiful child with eyes that had faded from a darkened sapphire to her more muted greyish-blue, his thick black curls just like his father’s, and knew what she had to do. She could feel his distress; she knew that every moment he spent with her was a moment that drove a fragment of sorrow under his skin. She was baggage.

       Somehow, her shaking hands managed to open the car door and her bare feet carried her into a gas station half a mile down the road. Once she stumbled in, looking like the walking dead and well aware of it, she approached the clerk.

“Can I use your phone?” He spat black tobacco juice into an old Campbell’s can.

“Gotta buy somethin’ to use the telephone.”

She sighed and pulled her last ten-dollar bill out of her bra. “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.”

He adjusted his hat, swiveled in his seat and wrung her up. “You okay, ma’am?”

“Fine. May I use your phone?”

“The booth’s around the corner, there’s a coin attached to a string, you can just put that in there every time they ask you for money.”

“Thank you kindly.”

       Sequestered in the phone booth and out of sight, Beth picked up the receiver and punched in the only phone number she had memorized.

“Where the fuck are you?”

“Ezra, I’m sorry.”

“You told me it was safe for him! Do you still have William with you? I’ve been searchin’ the highways for the last six hours.”

“You’ll find him in the truck, we’re somewhere near Kountze Texas, past the Shell gas station.”

“Beth, listen to me. Don’t leave him. You don’t gotta come back with me or nothing, but for Christ’s sakes, he’s barely four months old. Go back out to the truck and wait for me. I’ll get Greg’s car and be right there-”

“I love you.” She hung up. 


	4. Chapter Four

When consciousness returned, his first revelation was that he was alone. The rolling thunder of the freezing waves accompanied the wind’s piccolo as it howled across his battered body. Every inch of flesh felt as though it had been punched but he had yet to feel any pain- more of a blurred numbness. It was too cold for such things. His body was limp and dead, he felt every pound of his weight as he laid on the unforgiving sand. His eyes were swollen, whether, from the copious amounts of salt water or greater facial damage, he could not tell. All he knew is that Will was nowhere in his limited field of vision.

Logically, Hannibal knew that he needed to use his body’s natural response to his advantage. With wounds like his, he was unlikely to survive for more than a few hours on this beach. Not to mention the fact that the tide was slowly but surely coming in. He pushed the emotional pain out of his mind and concentrated on the physical, on his sopping clothing and his broken body. After several minutes of struggle, he managed to find his way to his hands and knees. He licked the blood from his lips and its familiar metallic tang reminded him that not all gods are immortal.

In his new position, he quickly scanned the blackness of the beach. The moon was full but relatively low in the sky, and he knew that he must have been unconscious for several hours. He could not make out much, but from what he saw, there was no sign of a second survivor. No tracks, no suspicious damp spots. Nothing. Anxiously, he glanced towards the water and felt a strange compulsion to throw himself into the sea that had spat him out. It was nonsense, and fueled by petty emotion.

In his new position, he began to slowly crawl the narrow beach. Two miles down, around a bend in the cliffs, he had a small boat docked in a tidal inlet. Originally, he had planned to set out with Will after spending a night in a real bed with a feast prepared from the Dragon’s remains in their bellies. The boat had a slightly-better-than-average first-aid kit, about a week’s worth of rations, a cabin and a small kitchenette. Less than ideal recovery conditions, but at least it was dry and sheltered.

By his own estimates, Jack Crawford’s team would not locate where Will and himself had run off to for about a day, as they had dumped the police car (and its GPS device) twenty miles from the mansion. Although he did not have Will’s beautiful gift, Hannibal could surmise what Jack would think about the scene. Constantly believing the best about his precious Will, he would no doubt assume that Hannibal had played him yet again. That he had not come of his own accord. That he could not kill. That Will was good. He’d see the blood trail and the cliff and assume that their fall was Hannibal’s doing. The world would mourn the death of the old Will Graham and ignore the rebirth of the new.

Dawn broke over the scene once Hannibal was close to the inlet, and he knew that his soaked clothes and blood loss would soon be the end of him. Using the last of his strength, he re-submerged to gain access to the area, staying close the shelf of rocks to his right so that he did not drown. Once he reached his boat, he clambered aboard in a most undignified and animalistic nature. He thought that if Will had been there, he would have laughed.

He immediately stripped and left his ruined shirt, pants, and silk boxers in a soaking heap. Years of inactivity at the hospital had left him weaker than he’d like to be, but he managed to get himself into the small bathroom. Using the kit, he disinfected his wounds and used superglue to close the worst of them. It was crude, but effective. He was glad he’d had the forethought to instruct Chiyoh to include a tube of it in his list of materials. Originally, he had intended to use it to help the wounds he would inevitably inflict on Will. Thinking of Will was strange. It did not feel like his thoughts about Mischa did. Both of them were lambs in his eyes, but Will had none of her innocence. No, the way his chest felt when thinking of Will was not the same tightening at the base of his throat when Mischa came to mind. Will’s presence in his mind palace was felt with a tightening at the base of his pelvis, a spike of adrenaline that blanched his veins, and a widening of pupils. Although he had never experienced it, Hannibal could easily diagnose his condition as lust.

Naked, he managed to find the small bed and collapse. Hopefully, Chiyoh would arrive in several hours, as per their prior plan, and they would cast off into the unknown.


End file.
